Having survived the 45+ inches of snow in Washington, D.C. over the last few weeks, I enjoyed Melissa Bell’s recent Washington Post article on medical cabinet “must-haves” during a snow storm. However, when I reached the bottom of her list which included Neosporin, Band-aids, and aspirin, among other items for minor illnesses, I was reminded of the Sesame Street tune and game: “One of These Things is Not Like the Other.”

Bell’s last “must-have” was “Plan B,” also known as the morning-after pill. “The morning-after pill may not be a must-have for every family,” she writes, “but for women who are sexually active, even if they’re married, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have Plan B.”

What she neglects to mention is that Plan B — unlike other birth control methods — can act as an abortifacient. It begs the question: Why, on a list of “necessities,” would Bell include a drug that could potentially end a human life? By substituting Plan B for traditional contraception, the Post is feeding into the propaganda that these pills are nothing more than birth control, when in fact they can have lethal implications.

Moreover, I am compelled to ask: why is a woman’s fertility (or perhaps an unwanted pregnancy) characterized in such a way that it is included in a list of common ailments?

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Earlier this week, British TV personality Ray Goslin made the shocking admission on a documentary that years ago he killed his lover, a man who was suffering from AIDS, by smothering him with a pillow while the doctor was out of the room.

In Goslin’s own words, “When you love someone, it is difficult to see them suffer.” Yesterday Ray Goslin was arrested.

We are created by God, from the moment of conception. God, the Creator, is the Author of life and determines the time and place and means of our (creatures’) deaths. There is no such thing as a “mercy” killing, in that removing His creature from His superintending care is an act of pretense. Such an act defies human dignity.

If Mr. Goslin’s story is true, he might well have acted out of his personal anguish. But he murdered someone – and that’s not an act of love.

For more on this issue, see FRC’s InFocus Paper: “Should We Legalize Voluntary Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide?“

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In the past few months, we have witnessed an intense legislative attack in many states against pregnancy resource centers. It is hard to comprehend why these centers, which have absolutely no monetary gain and exist solely to assist and support pregnant mothers in need, could be the target of such negativity.

To see what pregnancy centers are really like, view the video below — made by Focus on the Family Action — which shows the true story of a young pregnant woman who decided to choose life and received support for her decision through a pregnancy resource center in Colorado:

See also A Passion To Serve, a report compiling the history, vision, initiatives, etc., of pregnancy resource centers throughout the United States.

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Heartbeat International, an association of more than 1100 pregnancy help centers, is providing an opportunity for women served by these centers to bring their babies to Capitol Hill. These moms, accompanied by their babies, will meet with Members of Congress on January 21, 2010 to express their gratitude for the life-saving work of pregnancy help centers.

Our elected representatives need to know that pregnancy resource centers exist in most of their districts. These help centers are serving communities by uniting thousands of compassionate individuals with a passion for life, who also fund the community-based centers and serve as volunteers, to provide the emotional and practical help women facing unexpected pregnancies need. This network, including doctors, lawyers, nurses, social workers, educators and other professionals, provides the vital information women need to make an informed decision, the facts that abortion providers often leave out. As Peggy Hartshorn, President of Heartbeat International, stated, “Alternatives to abortion must be available so no woman ever feels forced to abort her baby.”

Moms and babies saved by pregnancy help centers want to send the clear message that pregnancy resource centers (PRC) are good for America. You can find out more about the untold story and impact of the PRC movement, and the tremendous good being done in our midst, at www.apassiontoserve.org. A combined services report, A Passion to Serve, A Vision for Life, records the development and vital work of the three major pregnancy resource network groups—Heartbeat, CareNet and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA). If you are interested in locating a pregnancy resource center, you can access http://www.optionline.org.

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On November 5, 2009, two days before the House vote on health care,
thousands gathered on Capitol Hill to be heard.

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A recent article published in the journal Contraception, discusses the failed “effectiveness” of the drug Plan B (a form of emergency contraception or “EC”) on a population level. The author of the articles concedes:

Our expectations for EC’s effectiveness were biased upwards by an early estimate that expanding access to emergency contraception could dramatically reduce the incidence of unintended pregnancy and subsequent abortion. This estimate made a compelling story and is likely a key reason why donors and other were willing to support efforts to expand access to EC.

The falsely inflated predictions noted above were — in order to dramatically decrease the incidence of unintended pregnancy and subsequent abortion — touted as valid estimates during the lead up to and the drug’s change to over the counter status to women 18 years and older in 2006. The admission of failures at a population level following expanded access is poignant. Additionally, it is clear that Planned Parenthood has been a primary profiteer through the increased marketing and sales process.

The article goes on to deflect from valid flags raised by the continued self-administration of Plan B and ignores salient women’s health issues surrounding drug usage including: the lack of medical oversight by a licensed clinician during usage to screen for contraindications; the lack of medical studies to determine safety for repeated and long-term usage; and, the failure to inform women of the potential abortifacient action of the drug — a violation of informed consent.

Additionally, the non-medical provider oversight during drug usage ignores a 2008 study release by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that young women most at-risk for contracting sexually transmitted infections and disease are not being referred for testing and treatment. The self-administration of Plan B knocks out a critical link in the care and referral chain for many women at-risk for disease. Such a link is vital for both secondary prevention or screening efforts and thus, the protection of women’s reproductive health.

Expanded access of Plan B to both women and adolescent girls are not in the best interest of either adolescent or women’s health promotion and disease prevention.

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Last week I mentioned the tragic death of a depressed young woman who drank antifreeze and presented a Living Will forbidding treatment to save here.  According to a Coroner’s Inquest this week, the doctors who let poor Keri Wooltorton, 26, die acted lawfully:

Doctors who allowed a young British woman to die in hospital after she swallowed poison and declared her intention to commit suicide acted lawfully, according to the findings of an inquest this week. Under the provisions of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, the coroner’s inquest ruled that doctors had no choice but to allow the woman to die after she had written a letter saying she did not want to be saved.

Read the full story here.

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Read this story of a poor young woman, just 26 years old, who was depressed about not being able to have a child.  She’s now dead, thanks to her Living Will which forbade emergency medical treatment to save her life after she swallowed antifreeze.

Whether the doctors were actually forbidden from saving her life or not, I don’t know – mightn’t her depression have impacted her competency to refuse live-saving treatment? — but they believed they were and the result is now irrevocable.

The story calls this the first case of a Living Will used to commit suicide.  How can we know this?   Perhaps it’s only the first obvious case.

The point here:  these are powerful legal documents, and Congress is poised to create a government-run health care system which will pay doctors to encourage patients to execute them.  Think of the perils.  People who are sick or in pain are inherently vulnerable.  They are also often depressed.  It would not take much to persuade them to sign away their right to future care.  Remember, the Hemlock Society drafted this section of the heatlh care bill.  I wonder what they think of the death of poor Kerrie Woolterton.

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Wednesday, September 30^th, FRC was very pleased to announce the release of a groundbreaking report, “A Passion to Serve, A Vision for Life:  Pregnancy Resource Center Service Report 2009” which coincides with the 40-year anniversary of the pregnancy resource center movement (“PRC”) in the United States. A collaborative project with the three major pregnancy resource center networks Care Net, Heartbeat International, the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, and LIFE International the report tells the story of a movement contributing in significant ways daily to the enhancement of maternal and child health nationwide, as well as around the world.

Go to www.apassiontoserve.com to learn more about the PRC movement and the report, view news stories, to order/download a copy of the report, and/or to view the press conference web cast. My remarks from the release Wednesday afternoon at the National Press Club are below:

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Here are some of the highlights from the FRCAction Health Care Townhall Webcast on Thursday, September 10, 2009.

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Here’s the full program of last night’s FRC Action webcast:

If you are reading this in an RSS Reader, you may need to click through to the post to view.

Participants:

• Tony Perkins, President, FRC Action
• Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)
• House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio)
• Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.)
• Ken Blackwell, former Ohio Secretary of State
• Doug Johnson, National Right to Life Committee
• Bishop Harry Jackson, Senior Pastor, Hope Christian Church
• Wesley J. Smith, Senior Fellow in Human Rights & Bioethics, Discovery Institute
• Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel
• Mark Kellen, M.D., President, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
• Kathryn Serkes, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
• Dr. David Prentice, FRC Senior Fellow for Life Sciences, FRC
• David Christensen, Senior Director for Congressional Affairs, FRC
• Tom McClusky, Senior Vice President, FRC Action

Resources mentioned:

• The Capps Abortion Amendment To Affordable Health Choices Act
• Family Coverage: An alternative to the President’s Plan
• Q & A on Health Care
• Ten Reasons Rationing is Included in the Health Care Bill
• Personal Faith, Public Policy by Tony Perkins and Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr.
• Saving Freedom, by Senator Jim DeMint
• More Health Care Resources…

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Patients deemed “terminally ill” by the state of Oregon are getting the sense that death is cheaper than saving their lives. Since Oregon offers a state-run health care plan, those who are terminally ill have been told that their treatments have been denied, but that they would be covered for assisted suicide.

Fox News aired a series called “America’s Future,” which is looking at the challenges we face in the 21^st Century. One series featured a man from Oregon, who was denied chemotherapy treatment and was offered physician assisted suicide instead.

“Oregon doesn’t cover life-prolonging treatment unless there is better than a 5 percent chance it will help the patients live for five more years — but it covers doctor-assisted suicide, defining it as a means of providing comfort, no different from hospice care or pain medication.

“It’s chilling when you think about it,” said Dr. William Toffler, a professor of family medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. “It absolutely conveys to the patient that continued living isn’t worthwhile.”

According to KATU, another cancer patient from Oregon shares a similar story, as she was being denied coverage for Tarceva, a powerful chemotherapy drug. Oregon’s health care plan offered her physician assisted suicide as well.

Since Oregon’s health care plan was created 15 years ago, this was prior to the advent of new life saving medicines. Instead of prolonging the life of a terminally ill cancer patient, Oregon is now sentencing them to death by denying coverage. If President Obama’s health care plan is passed, this will be the same message that millions across the country could be hearing.

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It’s not that unusual for me to have fellow worshipers come up to me after church, over coffee. Normally, however, we swap family stories, talk about children, grandchildren, hobbies, and common interests in our town. Yesterday, however, two friends sought me out with some urgency.

My first friend of the coffee hour was in anguish over his daughter’s decision to live the gay lifestyle. He and his wife had raised two daughters in their loving Christian home. Their younger daughter married and has blessed them with grandchildren. Their elder daughter pursued an academic career. He described this daughter as a brilliant scholar, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at a major university. But he and his wife are heartbroken over their daughter’s decision not only to live in a lesbian relationship with another woman, but also her plan to change her sex. Their daughter is beginning hormone treatments soon. Distraught over their daughter’s choices, he appealed to me for help.

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Science Czar or just plain bizarre?  Among President Obama’s growing list of czars – there are as many as 34, by one Congressman’s count – is the White House science czar, Dr. John Holdren.

Holdren wrote a text book with well-known scientist Paul Ehrlich.  Your remember Paul Ehrlich, right?  He wrote a popular but now discredited book entitled The Population Bomb more than three decades ago in which he claimed that the world was overpopulating and would be out of food by the end of the 1970’s.  Well, we’re still here, with greater food supplies than ever in history.

Holdren and Ehrlich’s book, which they wrote in 1977, is entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment.  In it, they advocate for radical government action to limit population growth.  Their proposals included coercive abortions for women and involuntary sterilization through infertility drugs placed in food or the water supply.

So-called “undesirables” – those that contribute to supposed “social deterioration,” would be forcibly sterilized at puberty.  Holdren also advocated a “planetary regime” that could control the global economy.  Holdren and the White House have dismissed the concerns saying he made those statements 30 years ago.

My question: Does he now disavow them?  And as he works in the White House shaping national policy, what recommendations is he making?

To learn more about how FRC is defending the culture of life, visit us as www.frc.org.

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FRC has recently noted the contradictions of the position of Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who calls himself “pro-life” but was actually drummed out of the Democrats for Life of America because his plan for reducing abortion is to give more money (for contraception) to America’s largest abortion provider (Planned Parenthood).

But this quote from Rep. Ryan in a LifeNews.com article about the split with Democrats for Life really jumped out at me: “I can’t figure out for the life of me how to stop pregnancies without contraception.”

Really? He “can’t figure it out”? Not “for the life of” him?

Perhaps Rep. Ryan is under the impression that engaging in sexual relations is mandatory. It’s not. Perhaps he thinks people will die if they don’t have sex. They won’t—but thousands die each year (of sexually transmitted diseases) because they do.

If Rep. Ryan “can’t figure out . . . how to stop pregnancies without contraception,” let me spell it out for him.

A-B-S-T-A-I-N.

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In this secular age where “science” trumps all else, it is borderline blasphemy to question the inerrancy of scientists. However, since I received this revelation of scientific misconduct from FRC’s resident scientist, Dr. David Prentice, I assume I have standing to bring it to your attention:

One in seven scientists says that they are aware of colleagues having seriously breached acceptable conduct by inventing results. And around 46 per cent say that they have observed fellow scientists engage in “questionable practices”, such as presenting data selectively or changing the conclusions of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.

Apparently a number of scientists, who increasingly are helping drive controversial public policies, don’t walk on water after all. Just because a “scientist” said it is so, doesn’t necessarily mean it is so.

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Veterans of the pro-life movement will remember Joe Barrett. No, they will find it impossible to forget Joe Barrett. Barrett, who died last week at 71, was described as a stormy petrel. That’s too pale, too pastel. Try screaming eagle. He was forever urging us to fight. He liked to compare politics to a barroom brawl: “Just walk in, throw the first punch, and see who lines up on your side.”

Joe had some unfortunate prejudices. He didn’t like Protestants, Republicans, or Yankees. William Allen White was all three of those things. White was a Kansas editor who wrote about FDR the day he died: “We who hate your gaudy guts salute you.”

I never hated Joe’s gaudy guts. But he was nothing if not gaudy and gutsy. Joe loved marching into Paul Weyrich’s weekly meetings on Capitol Hill-especially if someone from the Bush White House was there, or perhaps a congressional GOP leader. He would start off a blast: “The trouble with you Republicans…”

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His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales thinks you should curb your lifestyle. Britons, Europeans, Americans, according to the latest internet video message from this eminent royal personage, are endangering the planet with our penchant for high living.

It’s not just our caviar, our paté de foie gras, our champagne and oysters, not just our castles and hunting preserves, not just our private yachts and private jets, nor even our stables of race horses–it’s us. There are simply too many of us. And, worse, we persist in having more of us. Children. Horrors!

His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales thinks you should think twice about how your very being is threatening the Amazon Rain Forest and bringing about “climate change.” (Climate change is the latest evolution in the thinking of the right thinking elites about what they don’t like about us.) It used to be called Global Warming. But that’s so nineties, when it was actually warming. When too many reputable scientists raised their minority voices about warming, they sure felt the heat. Now, it’s always Climate Change. If you don’t think the climate is changing, just step outside, you denier.

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Lila Rose of Live Action Films again exposes Planned Parenthood’s reckless counseling practices. This time, Rose posed as a 14-year-old girl, who was impregnated by a 31-year-old man. Rose, in her dialogue with the Planned Parenthood counselor, mentions:

My boyfriend said he could pay for everything–But he shouldn’t come here to pay ’cause you’ll see him, right?” the counselor replies, “It doesn’t matter. As long as your parents are not here and can’t identify him, he can just pay and that’s it. He could be like your older brother or whatever.”

Tennessee law mandates that a minor must have parental consent before undergoing an abortion. Since the video has been released, two Tennessee state legislators, Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey and Sen. Jack Johnson, have introduced legislation that would defund Planned Parenthood.

“Why would citizens tolerate paying the bills of an organization that protects statutory rapists and victimizes young girls? This is the sad result of the careless abortion-first mentality that has persisted at Planned Parenthood for decades.”

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